Schwarzman Center opens for concerts – new national cultural monument | Classical music

Men 1676 the London musician Thomas Mace proposed a bold idea. Instead of having to endure “interference with talking, crowding, sweating and shaking”, listeners should enjoy music in a dedicated space: “a music room … easy and suitable for playing”. For the first time the concert was open to everyone for the price of a ticket, although hungry new listeners had to wait until 1748 and the construction of Oxford’s Holywell Music Room – the oldest public hall in Europe – to realize Mace’s vision with a room of their own.

Since then, the stadium has served as a mirror for changing fashion, priorities and politics. Compare the elegant fantasy of the 19th-century Royal Albert Hall with the elegant post-war architecture of the Royal Festival Hall. At Oxford the Holywells were joined by a number of others, though none without their problems – until now.

Log in Blackstone founder Stephen A Schwarzman and a donation of £185m to create the Schwarzman Center for the Humanities, a home not only for the seven humanities groups of Oxford University and the new Institute for Ethics in AI, but also for theatres, cinemas, museums and the Sohmen Concert Hall with 500 seats.

Tested, modified and installed since last October, the building (described by the project director Alexandra Vincent as “not a gym, not an educational building, but a hybrid”), was opened to the public for the first time this weekend, welcoming 12,000 visitors, all who want to see – and hear – the results.

The the world’s first Passivhaus concert venuemeaning that it passes the highest standards of energy efficiency, Sohmen with wood plays the long game. The intensity of the lecture hall is at an all-time high until the music starts, when the Arup consultants prove their mettle.

There is a haloed quality to the sound produced on this stage. The Scottish Ensemble’s program of Shostakovich’s C minor Chamber Symphony and Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings have proven this time and again. Playing from the heart, 21 string players moved through the sky, moving galaxies, and combined Örjan Andersson’s paintings with large, musical hands that ringed the sky like a bell. Between the two works the band broke up, leaving director Jonathan Morton alone, filming the strange, arabesque style of Nicola Matteis’s Alia Fantasia: every husk of a bow-on-a-string, every ornament, every splendour.

The heart of Schwarzman is the Great Hall – a galleried atrium with an octagonal dome. “Choir installation” – 360 Vessels – artist Es Devlin and composer Nico Muhly – gave the opening ceremony, welcoming the audience who sat like the Last Supper on long curved tables, a clay pot in front of each one. A simple idea – drinking tea together with a newly commissioned song – turned out to be sublime, successful. Devlin became the priestess presiding over the Eucharistic choir, while Steven Grahl played a feeble, untrained Schola Cantorum that evokes the scattered choruses of Monteverdi’s Venice, but with only a few words. Schwarzman is a new reminder of national culture but, when it comes to tradition, even AI can’t fill the void of spirituality.